For an organization to be efficient, productive, and appreciated by its customers, it must deliver an exceptional customer experience, and for this, having a Help Desk is essential.
However, improving the workflow in this type of software can be complex and multi-layered.
What is involved in using this type of software?
Receiving and assigning requests, sorting them, prioritizing them, triggering specific actions for essential cases, and sending response notifications.
Failure to do so can lead to unwanted consequences such as loss of credibility and discomfort among your customers, which in the long run can generate significant costs for your company.
Therefore, paying particular attention to how your organization manages your Help Desk workflow is essential, starting by understanding its complexity.
Below, we explain the levels of support offered by the Help Desk. And in parallel, we help you establish the 4 Steps to improve your Help Desk workflow.
What are the levels of customer support service?
First-level Support
The Help Desk’s first-level support represents the first contact between the user and your organization. Its goal is to respond immediately to incidents related mainly to IT and the operation of these technologies.
In this aspect, it is essential to:
- Efficiently manage the management and response to requests.
- Take care of the costs that this level of support may represent.
How can you achieve this? The key is for the personnel to collaborate at this level. Ideally, they should be junior collaborators, leaving the more experienced senior agents for higher levels of support.
In addition, you can also rely on self-service. Use knowledge bases, FAQ sections, or chatbots to expedite simple cases that require little technical knowledge.
Second-level Support
Here we deal with more complex incidents whose solution goes beyond the FAQ section or self-service.
For this reason, qualified personnel receives all these cases from different areas of knowledge.
The agent assigned to the case will assume the follow-up to provide support until finding the solution. Or, if not, the case is referred to higher instances.
Likewise, User Manuals compile the solutions to these problems.
In this regard, the transition to the next level initiates when the solution to the issue escapes the Second Level of Support’s technical ability to solve it.
Third-level Support
Incidents related to the back-end, i.e., maintenance systems, are handled here.
The specialists in charge of these incidents must focus on research and development of solutions to new or unknown problems.
Fourth-level support
This is the highest and most complex level of support. Why? Because the solution to problems that go beyond this level requires knowledge related to the installation, configuration, interconnection, administration, and operation of the servers.
The specialists who attend this level have at least two certifications. And they are located in the systems area of the organization.
Regardless of the level and type of support for which the incident occurs, the Service Desk Operators must inform the client of each step his request passes.
To do so, they should use email messages and chats, instant notifications via cell phone, and other means of communication.
4 steps to improve workflow in an IT help desk
1. Improve Case Logging
Improving the Help Desk workflow begins when you receive a support request through any of the communication channels available to you.
The channels available will depend on the capacity of your Help Desk. But, in general, they are as follows:
- Website
- Social media
- Phone
- Self-service portal
Here you must ensure that the new issue is registered through a ticket with the number and description of the problem. This process is called Local Bug Tracker (LBT).
2. Classify The Incidents by Priority in Your Help Desk
This step involves diagnosing and classifying the incident according to its specific characteristics.
The Customer Service agent must gather all the necessary information to resolve the case by referring it to the Self-Service or FAQ Section.
What happens if more is needed to resolve the issue? The case escalates and enters the second level of customer support.
3. Optimize case escalation in your Help Desk
This third step in improving the Help Desk workflow is to optimize case escalation when higher levels of support are required to respond.
Incident escalation comes to the rescue when incidents require a piece of more specific and advanced knowledge to be solved. At this stage, the third-level support is linked to back-end or maintenance systems.
The specialists in charge of these incidents must investigate and develop new solutions since the incidents that reach this level are new or unknown to the organization.
4. Constantly Update Your Knowledge Base
This last step focuses on the incident closure process and is independent of the tool’s resolution level.
First, the ticket corresponding to the incident must be closed in the Help Desk.
Then, all the information obtained in the resolution process must be used to feed the existing knowledge base in the area.
With this, any other collaborator can consult this knowledge base to solve future cases similar to the current one.
This is vital for the continuous improvement of processes, in addition to the effectiveness of customer service, which directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Take advantage of your Help Desk
In summary, structuring the Help Desk workflow at different levels, according to the type and difficulty of the requests received, is vital to bring efficiency and quality to customer service.
Implementing the 4 steps to improve your Help Desk Workflow will help you to:
- Reduce your organization’s technical support costs.
- Improve resource management.
- Raise the quality of customer service.
If this information has broadened your perspective, and you want to implement these four steps to improve your company’s Help Desk workflow, contact us!
At GB Advisors, we assist and advise you to optimize processes and raise the quality of your organization’s products and services through software.
